Update at 1:52 p.m. ET: The death toll from a landslide that crushed a school in Yunnan province has risen to at least 16, with three others still missing, the Xinhua news agency reports.

Another person was seriously injured in the landslide, which hit in an area struck only last month by an earthquake that killed 81 people.

Earlier post: A resident in a nearby farmhouse was also buried by the landslide that struck around 8.a.m. local time.

The mud and rocks slid down a steep hillside after several days of rain, the state broadcaster CCTV reports, according to CNN.

"When we arrived, we saw one side of the mountain had collapsed and covered the primary school," Yang Jianping, squadron leader of Yiliang County Armed Police, tells CCTV. "We can't recognize the school at all."

The students at the Tiantou Primary School in the village of Zhenhe would normally have been off Thursday for a national holiday, but were instead making up for classes they missed because of an earthquake last month that killed at least 81 people, the Associated Press reports.

Rescue teams pulled the bodies of five students from the rubble, but the fate of 14 other students was not immediately clear.

The students were buried by an estimated 160,000 cubic meters of earth that also plugged a nearby river, forming a lake that is 45 wide and 21 feet deep.

Xinhua says the government moved 800 residents downstream while nearly 2,000 people were mobilized to reopen the river.